Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
More poetry than prose., 1 Dec 1998
By A Customer
Prof. Bloom writes in a very difficult style and his conceptual leaps are sometimes difficult to follow. But if you love great poetry, it is certainly worth struggling against his erudition to find what lies beneath, a true love of language.
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7 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Seminal, 18 Jan 2004
As a theory of intertextuality, Bloom's work has one major drawback: his notion of an agon is too intentionalist to have provable broad applications without an uncomfortable degree of speculation and special pleading. Bloom's psychologism, which transposes to texts structures of the unconscious, most of all the Oedipus complex, may be traceable in cases where the allusiveness of the text is verifiable by means of the author's biography, in other cases, however, it seems to revert us back to a time when then Author's "meaning" was sought and recovered. Nevertheless, Bloom's intertextual model also has one major significance:unlike the more mechanistic and formalistic models of other theoreticians, Bloom re-instates into the dicourses on intertextuality the love-hate relationships between texts and authors of texts, the essential eroticism of artistic creation, which, in conjunction with the power relations that are always implicated in discourse, make up for a more nuanced understanding of the creative process. The book is recommended for advanced users only - and, for that matter, those with enough patience to struggle their way through Bloom's very idiosyncratic mode of expression.
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4 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
the most important book in theory of literature, 30 May 1998
By A Customer
Harold Bloom is an erudite and scholar writer and professor and his critic of literature, the formation of a writer, a strong writer in his own words, is contained in this "box of Pandora" that is the name i choose for The Anxiety of Influence, the most important book i've read concerning this theme: what is an author, the formation of an author, the agon with the older writers, specially Shakespeare and the anxiety, the enormous anxiety and suffering for becoming a strong author, an agon, the internal struggle of the writer. This book is more than a book, is a vital inspiration for those that can really read it in despite of the anxiety of reading it or because of it. I admire very much the personality of Harold Bloom, a treasure of the american culture.
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